Slashdot Mirror

Since like forever, the old men who are afraid of their womens getting loose have used the Korans, Bibles, Talmuds, etc to control their womens. Fear and Freedom don't mix well. Let's all be a little more brave and learn to tell all the batshit religious crazies to fuck off. I don't care if they do raise hell and blow stuff up - eventually there won't be enough left of them to matter.

I seem to recall various atheist countries that were afraid of their people getting loose used Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong Il, and others to control their people. One of the pioneers in suicide bombing were the Tamil Tigers, an essentially secular movement. Batshit crazy is crazy no matter the source. If Europeans don't get their birthrate up, eventually there won't be enough of them to matter. Guess who has the higher birth rate? Native European are on the self-chosen path to extinction, and they will take their values with them. The immigrants don't share them even though they share the land which may eventually be theirs.

No Babies?

In the 1990s, European demographers began noticing a downward trend in population across the Continent and behind it a sharply falling birthrate. Non-number-crunchers largely ignored the information until a 2002 study by Italian, German and Spanish social scientists focused the data and gave policy makers across the European Union something to ponder. The figure of 2.1 is widely considered to be the “replacement rate” — the average number of births per woman that will maintain a country’s current population level. At various times in modern history — during war or famine — birthrates have fallen below the replacement rate, to “low” or “very low” levels. But Hans-Peter Kohler, José Antonio Ortega and Francesco Billari — the authors of the 2002 report — saw something new in the data. For the first time on record, birthrates in southern and Eastern Europe had dropped below 1.3. For the demographers, this number had a special mathematical portent. At that rate, a country’s population would be cut in half in 45 years, creating a falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover.

Fertility statistics

When you actually look at the demographics, the Tea Party crew are actually more educated than the average American. They aren't lacking in logical abilities, but the impression that they do comes from televised news, which in its frenzy for ever-more-senationalist stories to generate ad revenue likes to focus on the fringe that staple tea bags to their foreheads and carry around signs reading "GIT LARNED SUM ANGLISH FUR YALL COME TO DIS COUNTRY" (hint: the more mainstream Tea Party members concern themselves with economic issues like taxation, not so much immigration).

This one Saudi cleric, however, is clearly on the fringe of even Saudi religious authority. So, you're right if you want to compare this guy to the kind of looney fringe of the Tea Party that you'll see on TV, but not if you want to compare him to the average Tea Party member.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/nyregion/fbi-tapes-give-glimpse-into-world-of-high-stakes-gambling.html

As I write this, I don't see a single mention on cnn.com of this story.

As if CNN is the only news outlet.
In our opinion: Make the NSA accountable
NSA maps some Americans' social connections, says report
N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens

I first heard about it on Good Morning America this morning. It was an AP story. Getting your news from a single source isn't very smart.

You keep assuming a fiction that isnt true at all.

Pete wants to buy MSFT Paul wants to sell.
They are not HFT so they dont ever get to see the "current" price as its fluctuating faster than they can read it.
Before HFT they make a trade and one if them does a little better than the other as the price moved before their orders were processed.

They both only see old information that is out of date compared to your special information.

Now with HFT, you can see that they are using old information about the past price of the stock, only you know the "current" price and can quickly jump in the middle and make money on the spread between the real "current" price you see and the old price everyone else sees.
Instead of Pete or Paul having that little bit of money, now you have it instead, the only risk you face is if someone else has even faster and more "current" information than you do and skimms of you as well.

The price could shoot up...

And you would know before anyone else because of your privileged position and you would skimm of as much as you can before the rest of us find out.

Someone else provided a link I guess you wouldnt like us to see
30 milisecond advantage

Here is a quote from the article:

But these polls ignore how much the meanings of the terms have changed. The rightward drift in economic thinking becomes apparent in surveys asking about specific issues. In surveys 25 years ago, 71 percent of Americans believed it was the government’s job to take care of those who couldn’t care for themselves, according the Pew Research Center. This year the share is down to 59 percent. And most of the shift reflects a decline among Republicans.

It is appalling to see so many people blaming users for the results of a policy Americans keep voting for. This is a public health outcome of the "War on Drugs", which, like any other war on a thing, is really just a war on people.

Blaming addicts is a craven political tactic used by powerful incumbents to protect their incomes: Local and federal law enforcement agencies who's funding depends on drug prohibition, privatized prisons and their lobbies, grandstanding politicians who campaign on "getting tough" on things, and gangsters and smugglers all have a vested interest in the status quo. The outcome cannot improve until we refuse to be duped, demand reform.

Desperate users who are already opioid addicts are exploited by sellers of krokodil, they are not normal healthy people who "choose to try it". It is unreasonable to assume that users of this substance have given informed consent to be poisoned; they do not enjoy the same autonomy that you and I do, they are desperate, and they are not easily able to evaluate the quality or authenticity of black market drugs.

Drug prohibition is economically nonsensical. It is an explicitly stated aim of law enforcement to increase the street price of narcotics. Therefore, prohibition incentivizes the black market and makes users less safe and more desperate. Black market opioids are expensive and contaminated _because_ they are criminalized, and the desperation of addicts is exacerbated by our policy. We have deliberately created a situation where heroine costs $250 per gram and addicts must choose between getting DT's and robbing houses.

Drug prohibition is predicated on the ideas that narcotics diminish our autonomy, and that we are all susceptible to addiction to some degree. It is incoherent to support prohibition and blame addicts at the same time. It's also hypocritical. How many of you have consumed a pharmaceutical opioid or other narcotic, and thereby chosen to risk addiction?

We are not morally or intellectually superior to addicts. Moreover, blame is no solace to the millions of people who are imprisoned, killed by gangsters, or poisoned, and it is cruel, pedantic, and beneath us... oh wait, this is slashdot.... but seriously:

Even if we don't care an iota for the welfare of drug users, we ought to resent the fact that we are footing the bill for a colossal boondogle which is perverting our legal system, and destabilizing neighboring states.

Krokodil is a market outcome of drug prohibition. We should stop voting for it.

here's another one

An actual candidate for political power in your country. The politest thing that can be said about that woman was "boastful ignoramus", and your lot chose her, put her within reach of serious decision making. Such a close call for your country. Your hagiography of Reagan led your GOP drones to think that intelligence is a fault.

And you nearly elected a former beauty contestant and religious zealot to be leader-in-waiting.

It would have been the biggest incentive ever for cancer research though wouldn't it? All the money in the world would have been spent on stopping McCain getting ill, would have been twice as important as the Manhattan project and Apollo put together.

Here's one from another pretty lady.

I don't know about that -- this article which ran recently in the NY Times would seem to back the notion that Germany's energy policy is complicated and is making electricity expensive enough that it is beginning to have
unintended consequences.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/world/europe/germanys-effort-at-clean-energy-proves-complex.html?pagewanted=all

I don't know if it's a "real" phrase, but you might call it energy poverty -- when electricity is so expensive it becomes a driver of poverty. The guy in the article basically lives off a 5w lightbulb.

While electricity costs in the third world are high, energy scarcity is driven by poverty instead of driving poverty, and offset in a lot of ways by climate and ways of life which are more rural and traditional.

no why?
But from a link from a link in TFA : make trolls pay http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/opinion/make-patent-trolls-pay-in-court.html?smid=pl-share&_r=1& . "This particular judge is trying to do it" would be a fair assumption
Unfortunately I can not be in a jury like this one : I'm not a US citizen. I'm Canadian and if there is ever something like this her I'd ask the same question and I'd be happy to.

Sleeping after lunch works well for a lot of people. I'm Spanish -- we know about our 'siesta'.

There's evidence that we naturally used to sleep in two phases, and some people have suggested a similar pattern to yours.

This needs to be said. That SAME IPCC is releasing a report in a few days saying despite the "massive increase in CO2" measurable temperature increases are not happening. NYT source

Since we are throwing around anecdotes and pretending that we aren't, I have this for you. Oregon already got its first snow of the year, a record early time.

So fatwilbur attempted to "be reasonable" and explain that anecdotes don't matter and then he made up a stance of the IPCC that isn't true and used an anecdote without a shred of proof to back it up, while I found one that is record breaking in support of the opposite view with evidence. This seems to be a common theme in these AWG debates on /. One side makes up crap and name calls while pretending to "be reasonable" and the other side shows actual evidence and points out scientific fraud.

DEMOCRATS say "You WILL eat bugs."

REPUBLICANS say you won't eat at all /irrelevant-political-slam-rebuttal

You are playing their game too, you just get outraged because they play it more efficiently. They played enough with the rules to make millons just moving aluminum between 2 warehouses. Life is more than money, but for our current culture is everything.

This sort of stuff happens all the time.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/knight-capital-says-trading-mishap-cost-it-440-million/

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100980489

Journal citation please.

How about this Frdiay when the new IPCC report is released? http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/science/earth/extremely-likely-that-human-activity-is-driving-climate-change-panel-finds.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

If I may choice quote:

On another closely watched issue, the scientists retreated slightly from their 2007 position. Regarding the question of how much the planet could warm if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere doubled, the previous report largely ruled out any number below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The new draft says the rise could be as low as 2.7 degrees, essentially restoring a scientific consensus that prevailed from 1979 to 2007.

They move the goalposts constantly as they discover the realized climate does not match their expectations. Of course, the global warming cult just calls this process "the scientific method". Although it's certainly a very different one than I remember from school. All I see is a bunch of people haphazardly guessing at something they clearly don't fully understand, while feigning certainty.

Notice the "henceforth". Passing an ex post facto law is contrary to the Constitution and to good sense. This doesn't mean, however, that we cannot change the law with regard to the future. Those responsible for the mortgage crisis may be moral failures, but you're right to say that in at least some cases they didn't violate the law. What I mean by "henceforth" is that I would want jail time for those who engage in shenanigans in the future. I have in mind cases like the 2010 settlement Goldman Sachs managed to get with the SEC. The guys were committing fraud and when the SEC went after them they agreed to pay $300 million to Treasury and half that to investors. Even setting aside the paltry sum involved, this kind of settlement doesn't make sense because the individuals who made such decisions did not and will not suffer personally for the damage they caused. It neither punishes the wrongdoers nor deters those who would emulate their example.

As for the other bill, I would argue that agencies like the DEA and NSA have in at least one sense violated the law, though they break no statute with any penalty attached. Again, it would be contrary to Constitutional principles to pass a law now that would throw decision-makers at the DEA and NSA in jail for things they've done in the past. But agents and policy makers should, in the future, face some personal penalty for exceeding their authority.

Let me put it this way. If in the course of an investigation a cop enters your home without permission or a warrant, whatever he might find could well be thrown out in court as inadmissible and rightly so. Personally, I think he ought also to be charged with breaking and entering but that's another conversation. But suppose his boss put fourth barging into people's houses or random search and seizure as a policy. If we're lucky, whatever is found as a result might be thrown out in court. If we really lucky, there'll soon be someone new in charge of the department. But those who create policies requiring agents to act in excess of their legal authority and contrary to Constitutional law will not be charged for doing so. Even if the courts decide that the DEA cannot snoop through your medical records without a warrant, those who ordered them to will not suffer for doing so. Even if we're so lucky to have a court which sees the NSA's violation of the Fourth Amendment, the most we'll have out of a James Clapper, Keith Alexander, or a Janet Napolitano will be a begrudging, "oops." This must change. Unless we wish agencies to claim ever more authority, those in charge of the agencies must have more to worry about than evidence being excluded in someone else's trial.

This is on the top of the NYTimes homepage as I write this comment (though I will admit it was the only major US news agency I found that had anything on their homepage about it)

I don't see anybody calling the Syrian insurgency "terrorists"

I certainly do.

That is outright false. I challenge you to provide a citation to a reasonably authoritative site saying that - basically anybody who isn't a kook. You can't.

Clearly you phrased it that way so you could reject any site I offered, based on your own myopic view point.

So here are the rules:
You don't get to reject any source! You have to invalidate every one of these and all of their claims.
After all, extraordinary claims of something being "outright false" require extraordinary proof.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/03/16/has-https-finally-been-cracked/
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/05/government-betrayed-internet-nsa-spying
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/05/nsa_gchq_ssl_reports/
http://www.zdnet.com/has-the-nsa-broken-ssl-tls-aes-7000020312/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/20/leaked-nsa-doc-says-it-can-collect-and-keep-your-encrypted-data-as-long-as-it-takes-to-crack-it/

Anonymity != Privacy because we're in the age of big data where large data sets can be cross-correlated to profile an individual. From stores that track your cell phone while you're shopping to big chain stores figuring out you're pregnant, big data techniques are invading your privacy in more and more ways. If you think that anonymous data collection is safe, it's still data collection and despite people's best efforts, we are of course creatures of habit and your repetitive habits allow people to build fingerprints about you. If you have enough data points, even anonymous data points, you can build a profile of an individual, their habits, their likes, their dislikes and where they go on the Internet. If you can take that profile and match it against an individual using other correlating data you've been identified. This has been proven for example in the 2007 Netflix prize competition where anonymous movie reviewers were tracked down. There's lots of examples on this and over the past few years, techniques have become much better at picking individuals out of anonymous data sets.
  More chilling is a study released this year showed that using in analyzing anonymous cell phone tracking data, 95% of 1.5 million individuals could be identified.

What this means that as long as companies are able to collect data about you, whether tagged or anonymous, you're still being tracked somewhere and that is no guarantee that your privacy is protected. What has to happen to provide privacy is to stop all of the tracking and I don't see companies nor governments giving up that mechanism anytime soon.

Which is a meaningless statement for many reason. It's not like China is our poor mother who lends us a few billion every time we get into trouble. "Debt" on a national scale doesn't work that way, and US debt levels are not out of the ordinary.

Nobody understands debt.

Apparently you fundamentally misunderstand both science and philosophy/religion.

Philosopher Gary Gutting:

The success of science gives us every reason to continue to pursue its experimental method in search of further truths. But science itself is incapable of establishing that all truths about the world are discoverable by its methods.
 
Precisely because science deals with only what can be known, direct or indirectly, by sense experience, it cannot answer the question of whether there is anything—for example, consciousness, morality, beauty or God—that is not entirely knowable by sense experience. To show that there is nothing beyond sense experience, we would need philosophical arguments, not scientific experiments.

Funny you should say that... it did, or will. Not sure if it's priced in yet.

Our founding fathers didn't fear terrorism. They feared tyranny.

Our founding fathers fought tyranny. They fought to be free of the tyranny of the mad King George. They structured the first US government, the Articles of Confederation, with that concern in mind, producing a very weak government. They went too far and the government was a failure, so they wrote the Constitution in which the federal government was more powerful, but with limits, checks, and balances. They continued to fight tyranny when it threatened Americans.

One should also keep in mind that Benjamin Franklin headed an organization that opened other people's mail, fellow colonists, for intelligence purposes. George Washington was also a spy master that had agents in many places.

War of Secrets; Spy History 101: America's Intelligence Quotient

America's history of spying began in the beginning, with George Washington, who famously declared ''the necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent and need not be further urged.'' Washington warned that the process depended on secrecy, ''for upon secrecy, success depends in most enterprises of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated, however well planned and promising a favorable issue.''

Notwithstanding the hanging of Nathan Hale before he could hand off his assessment of enemy troops, America often succeeded at divining British military maneuvers and at manufacturing misinformation. Returning to England after the Revolutionary War, Maj. George Beckwith, London's spymaster in the colonies, remarked bitterly that ''Washington did not really outfight the British; he simply outspied us!''

Many people today are ignorant of what true tyranny looks like.

The global average temperature is still trending up.

Source 1
Source 2
Source 3

Many more available online.

I read your first sentence and stopped. When you begin with a lie the rest of what you say is probably crap. Is this a case that if you say it enough people will just refuse to look up the truth for themselves?

but is this seriously such a problem with people shitting and puking on trains...

Yes, sadly it is, particularly on the weekends when people are out "living their life to the fullest". It's their life so what do they care about the mess they leave behind?

Witness what happens in New York City parks on weekends.

Really? Politicians focus on sugary drink portion sizes and intervening in foreign civil wars, but can't be bothered to address a widespread racketeering hustle the destroys innovation?

By the way, here's an example of a modern day patent troll as profiled by the NY Times. A real class act.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/business/has-patent-will-sue-an-alert-to-corporate-america.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

"root cause of the problem" is too many human beings.

No, it's resource consumption. The planet could support double the number of people we have now if we restrained ourselves to Cuban levels of consumption.

why not triple the number as we can restrain ourselves to North Corean levels of consumption

"root cause of the problem" is too many human beings.

No, it's resource consumption. The planet could support double the number of people we have now if we restrained ourselves to Cuban levels of consumption.

All of the woes that you mention such as pollution are caused by excessive population.

A comfort lie first-worlders tell to absolve themselves of responsibility for their resource consumption. It's not people living in Cuba dumping all that plastic waste into the ocean. The average American uses the same amount of resources as 32 Kenyans.

Okay, first, we are never given a choice. Usually, our "choice" is between a member of the Skull and Crossbones club, and a member of the Skull and Crossbones club. Our Yale club Skull and Crossbones, whose members also occupy most of the high appointed positions by now, was an outgrowth of Nazi Germany; more specifically it seems to tie to the occult pagan rituals that were associated with high ranking nazis who appeared, well, posessed.

I really should just rate the above "-1, Troll", but, hey, some people might actually think it's not nonsense, so:

1. it's "Skull and Bones", not "Skull and Crossbones";
2. not every US major-party presidential candidate went to Yale, so not every US major-party presidential candidate is a member of Skull and Bones;
3. you aren't really saying that Nazi Germany existed well before World war I, are you?

Or is there actually a "Skull and Crossbones" club, separate from Yale's Skull and Bones, which accepts people who have never had anything to do with Yale, and was only founded some time after 1933?

Black holes are not particularly special; the event horizon isn't some solid barrier things crash into. It's merely the point of no return, beyond which escape velocity exceeds the speed of light.

That's the conventional view. However lately an argument has been presented which essentially says that if you pass the event horizon you'd burn up in a massive "firewall". And from what I gather, the argument has been very hard to dismiss...

Not-quite-random links here and here.

Couldn't tell ya; I'm neither a service member nor a rapist.

Although I will say it does sound remarkably similar to the denim defense.

Snowden didn't commit treason either. In 1945 the Supreme Court ruled that treason requires adhering to a specific enemy, which neither of them did.

Jesse White, the Maytag repairman, died in January 1997. We live in an increasingly disposable world.

PLEASE.... [...] vote in anyone that will at least make lip service that this type of thing will end.

That worked so well for us with Obama. In 2007, before being elected president for the first time, he said he'd put an end to the "illegal wiretapping of American citizens." (see, for example, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/06/08/us/politics/08obama-surveillance-history-video.html)

What now?

I just found this new blog post from the NYT which gives a very small amount of additional context. It also explicitly names the NSA RNG as what they were talking about.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/government-announces-steps-to-restore-confidence-on-encryption-standards/

But internal memos leaked by a former N.S.A. contractor, Edward Snowden, suggest that the N.S.A. generated one of the random number generators used in a 2006 N.I.S.T. standard — called the Dual EC DRBG standard — which contains a back door for the N.S.A. In publishing the standard, N.I.S.T. acknowledged “contributions” from N.S.A., but not primary authorship.

Internal N.S.A. memos describe how the agency subsequently worked behind the scenes to push the same standard on the International Organization for Standardization. “The road to developing this standard was smooth once the journey began,” one memo noted. “However, beginning the journey was a challenge in finesse.”

At the time, Canada’s Communications Security Establishment ran the standards process for the international organization, but classified documents describe how ultimately the N.S.A. seized control. “After some behind-the-scenes finessing with the head of the Canadian national delegation and with C.S.E., the stage was set for N.S.A. to submit a rewrite of the draft,” the memo notes. “Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor.”

The Guardian, ProPublica, the NYT and Schneier all appear confident enough in what they've read to state assertively that it's a hacked standard. Also, why else would the NSA care so much about pushing a crap and slow RNG that we know can have a backdoor into international standards?

Sorry, I could have provided a link for that too. It was in the major Snowden story of last week that revealed the NSA was undermining public standards. The New York Times said this:

Simultaneously, the N.S.A. has been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers. One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method.

Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members.

Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”

“Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor,” the memo says.

Although the NYT didn't explicitly name the bad standard, there's only one that fits the criteria given which is Dual_EC_DRBG.

They wanted to leave the USA and become their own country. Why would any one be surprised by this?

False equivalence. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/opinion/krugman-the-centrist-cop-out.html

The Republicans are worse.

In addition to everything the Democrats do, the Republicans want to destroy the government, take away your right to abortion, and abandon the poor to die.

I think you missed something:

Chinese protest at planned chemical plant over pollution fears

A similar protest earlier this month in Chengdu, the capital of adjacent Sichuan province, was suppressed by police.

Sometimes the party is willing, but the police are weak.

On the other hand, the Chinese government has been liberalizing in various aspects. I think this incident was quite remarkable:

Chinese Villagers Under Siege Mourn Man Who Died

Of course, then there are these two items:
China's Leader Embraces Mao as He Tightens Grip on Country
China Takes Aim at Western Ideas

I think I now have enough hands to be an economist.

I really don't give a fuck about the 'murican freedum for individuals to destroy their own health

...and I really don't give a fuck about your minimalistic view of freedom. You are an obnoxious, manipulative white knight of the type that encouraged me to start smoking smoking in the first place. So, be aware that your methods can backfire in paradoxical ways.

It's not like anyone is *unaware* of the deleterious effects of smoking at this stage. Further turning smokers into social pariahs isn't serving your cause.

Smokers are a burden on society.

Citations needed. Smokers are net contributors because the government has gotten into the tobacco business. Hell, the preponderance of the price per pack of cigarettes is taxes of one form or another. S-CHIP, state excise taxes, sales taxes, etc. Also, studies have shown that smokers are net contributors to "society" in terms of dying early and without lingering. Hell, we already pay for the increased actuarial cost in life and health insurance. What more do you want?

Furthermore, if *you* want to avoid being a burden on society, make sure you don't live to be old and linger on your way out... that's really costly to "society". Perhaps you should consider taking up a smoking habit for the common good of society, eh?

That's what you do when you're trying to save someone's life, and by extension, cure a cancer on society.

No, that's what you do, apparently.

I automatically think less of a person when I learn they're an active smoker.

...and I automatically thought less of you when I learned that you were someone who is eager to sacrifice our freedom to do with our bodies as we wish *especially* in ways that some others may disapprove of. You are probably a statist.

I guess we can agree on e-cigs and people dropping addictions they don't want. I have no desire to see people smoking if they feel unhappily compelled by their addiction. Contrariwise, I felt psychologically fulfilled by every aspect of the ritual every time I lit up—I was confirming my identity. That's the principal reason it was so difficult to convince myself to stop merely for "health".

It's not like I did not know that smoking caused high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, emphysema, and cancer before I started. So, if I knew about that before I started then how is that knowledge going to convince me to stop?

Ahh, so Clapper says they only collect the data [1] but do not actually inhale it.

Next you will be trying to convince us all that access to the gathered intelligence data is strictly controlled and only after [secret] court approval, for terrorism related reasons only.

[1] Probably because American's have been expelled from various countries various times for economic spying, so James Clapper cannot very apply the default PR script which is to deny it ever happens... as you are trying to lead us to believe applies in this case... cold fjord.

Ahh, so Clapper says they only collect the data [1] but do not actually inhale it.

Next you will be trying to convince us all that access to the gathered intelligence data is strictly controlled and only after [secret] court approval, for terrorism related reasons only.

[1] Probably because American's have been expelled from various countries various times for economic spying, so James Clapper cannot very apply the default PR script which is to deny it ever happens... as you are trying to lead us to believe applies in this case... cold fjord.

I realize you're probably trolling, but on the off chance you're simply ignorant, here are some articles that you might find interesting/informative.

This article shows the point of view of a westerner living in Japan and debunks some of the most common misconceptions people have.

This article details some of the cultural issues that continue to hinder their society.

These are some examples of the 'civilized' behaviours they've demonstrated in the past, and this is the attitude that they have towards said behaviours and those who committed them.

If you're going to idolize a country, at least do some research. It's like someone praising Josef Mengele for advancing medical science without looking at the bigger picture. Oh well, at least the Japanese weren't Mengele-level bad, right? Oh wait.

You can't lump all of the publishers together and call them 'multiple sellers', because they all sell different products.

They all sell books. Sure, books are more differentiated than, say, strawberries, but the vast majority of them are not strongly differentiated and are fairly expendable. They're simply books. If there was only one chain of theaters in your nation, would you be making the same argument about the movie studios?

If Amazon doesn't get some ridiculously low price for an ebook, what are they going to do, not sell it?

Uh, yes, that's exactly what Amazon has done and continues to do. They pulled all Macmillan books in response to a pricing dispute they had with the publisher back before the switch to the agency model, and they did it again just last year in response to another publisher who refused to lower their prices. The Macmillan issue was kinda a big deal at the time, and it was happening right in the middle of all of this stuff I'm talking about, hence why it was a valid concern that the publishers had.

As soon as they refuse to sell a book the door is thrown wide open for competitors to sell the book.

Sure...in theory. In practice, however, what alternative would the publishers have? At the time that this stuff was going on, Amazon had over 90% market share in the eBooks industry. B&N was the next closest, with less than 10%. Unless the publisher wanted to tank their own business, their only choice was to make a deal with Amazon, since they sure as hell couldn't hope that people would go out and buy a second $200 eBook reader from a competitor of Amazon's just so that they could read the books from that publisher.

Iraq bait-n-switch? You need to spend less time getting third hand information and more time finding it yourself.

Here is the Iraq war resolution. Pay special attention to the whereas lines. They lay out the official reasons we went to war and to the best of my knowledge, the only one that has turned out to be untrue was the continuing WMD programs and stockpiles. Those reasons were the ones argued going into the war by Bush and Company.

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-107publ243/html/PLAW-107publ243.htm

  The problem with the WMDs was that Iraq was trying to make it appear that they had them when they didn't and purposely thwarted efforts to verify their destruction per the UN security council resolution 686 (march 2 1991) and 687 (March 3 1991) that Iraq conceded to March 5th. If you think the WMDs were made up, then ask yourself why the government would lie to get us into a war and not put WMDs in the sand somewhere to keep it's citizens trusting of it. The bottom line was that Saddam feared Iran would find it a weakness if they verified they had no WMDs so he refused to allow that to happen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/03/world/middleeast/03saddam.html?ref=world&_r=0

You likely would have had better results if you used the Gulf of Tonkin as your example of being played REALLY badly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin

The whole story is an outright lie - to set up a desired chain of events, where striking Syria illegally will create an incident that can be trumped up as Iranian in origin, thus justifying an attack on the actual desired target.

I don't dispute this could all be a ruse. But the orders from Iran was a so called order if the US acted not something that would cause the US to act. We already know Iran feeds terrorist organizations and we already know who those organizations are. We have been able to piece the puzzles together since the mid 1980's.

In all seriousness, and I will likely be modded down for this because it's a negative on Obama. But he is a rank amateur in office who was attempting to gloat in some glory and made a statement that he is trying to wiggle out of. He drew a red line, he made a statement trying to act like the kid in class who wants to be more special or important then they are willing to be. He is the arm chair quarterback who thinks they can play the game better then those playing but when push comes to shove, refuses to suit up and get hit. So he made a statement, he is finding all sorts of opposition on it. England wants nothing to do with us on it as well as most of Europe. Russia warns us about getting involved (they are still pissed we ignored them on Libya). Russia claims the chemicals used were not weapons grade and the delivery mechanism was not military grade. They published that report with the UN. This could very well be a defining moment that restarts the cold war.

http://www.heraldonline.com/2013/09/05/5178949/russia-says-it-has-compiled-a.html

This release equivalence of "all hell will break loose if we bomb Syria because Iran is making sure of it" is most likely an attempt to persuade congress to deny authorization. I don't think Obama had any intent of changing his calculus in the first place and either made the statement to feel powerful at the time or in the hopes that it would completely deter any usage of the chemical weapons. Now he is backed into a corner and I think he is strongly attempting to find a way out. If congress denies his use of force, he can blame them. The so called war weary citizens will be even more vocal now that it is known that we (not just our ally Israel) will be attacked by known terrorist organizations backed and funded by Iran.

I think the totalitarian sickness Schneier describes goes well beyond the NSA. Computers and especially mobile devices are becoming creepy, for lack of a better word, even without government intervention. They are the prying eyes in your house Harriton High School Used Laptop Webcams To SPY On Students At Home, they are following your every move Government Location Tracking: Cell Phones, GPS Devices, and License Plate Readers, they are keeping tabs on what you like and don't like Mapping, and Sharing, the Consumer Genome (featured on slashdot yesterday, itself a thinly veiled phishing scam IMHO). Although subject to government abuse, none of the "services" highlighted in those links were instigated by the government. Just yesterday I was innocuously checking for prices for various professional training seminars on Google, and on cue my Email inbox started overflowing with unsolicited offers. On some days, I want to throw my smartphone in the trash and unplug my computer from the internet and only plug it back in when I need to access the SVN repository.

So Kudos to Bruce Schneier for addressing his call to the engineering community, but now it begs a question: aren't engineers, including those outside the NSA/DEA/FBI, somewhat responsible for creating this creepy user experience? I don't think they're suddenly going to wake up one day and fix it; a significant subset has embraced the creepiness and fundamentally doesn't understand why it might be a problem for others.

Not to excuse there blatantly illegal searches, but to thing the whole system is some corrupt entity that s out to get everyone is simply wrong.

Sure. Even the Nazis weren't "out to get everyone" -- just troublemakers. Good Germans had nothing to fear from the SS.

(Yeah, yeah, Godwin's law, I lose, whatever.)

If you're a middle-class white American of mainstream religious and political beliefs, someone whose idea of a wild time is drinking four Bud Lights at a Kenny Chesney show, of course you've got nothing to fear from massive government surveillance. (Well, unless you used to date someone who worked at the NSA or something.) You can scamper about on your merry way knowing that the state is only interested in spying on deviants. You know the type. Malcontents. Dreamers. Granola peaceniks.

Good citizens like you have nothing to fear. You can feel safe, knowing the government is your friend. Heck, almost family! It's like having a protective old sibling watching you. I mean, watching out for you.